Year: 2006

I was at JB Hi-Fi last night with spinboy and he pointed out these Wii preorder posters near the entrance. Whiile buying Singstar Legends and Clubhouse Games, I asked the woman behind the counter about the preorder:

Could you tell me about the Wii preorder deals?
The Wii…
It’s a game console…
There are posters advertising a preorder for it plastered over the entrance to this store…

At that point she said something along the lines of “Ooooh, I’ll call someone for you”. After a while, a sales guy turned up and quickly disappeared into the back room when I mentioned that I was after information on the Wii preorder. A few minutes later he emerged with a printout.

It seems that everything (I was interested in) is full-price, I would have to put $50 down, and I would get a few pretty random extras:

• A carry case (Okay, not that random. It looked pretty good actually).
• Wii-branded wrist and head bands (To complement the Wii Sports theme I suppose).

I’m not sure if that is enough to make me preorder. I’m not convinced that preordering will be necessary, and their service didn’t exactly instill any confidence that I would get the console and games without hassle. It would really suck to spend December 7 being messed around at JB knowing that Wiis are readily available at the Target across the road.

For a list of other preorder deals, check out Vooks’ Aussie Wii Preorder page from their Ultimate Aussie Wii Guide.

Update: I ended up preordering from my local Gametraders. I’m getting a Wii console, Wii Remote (with Wii Play), a Wii Nunchuk controller, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for $549.8 (a very good deal IMHO).

Planet OneTwenty is back up! (At an easy-to-remember address to boot!)

I gave it a bit of a visual overhaul. The CSS is still really messy (and will need a serious clean-up this weekend), but I’m happy with how the page looks (although I’ve only tested it under Firefox). I didn’t want it to look like every other Planet website out there! I’ll get the hackergotchis from Jim tomorrow (so each set of posts should have a little avatar next to it).

For those that don’t know, Planet OneTwenty is an aggregator for posts from the individual blogs of OneTwenty members and friends. Planet, the software used to run the site, is pretty popular in the geek community.

For those that do know: how do you make Planet use local time rather than UTC?

Update: It looks pretty crappy under Internet Explorer. (Actually… I just fixed this!)

Search for “Michael Jackson dance lessons” on YouTube and you can’t miss Ramady’s video tutorials. Sometimes questionable camerawork and clipping aside, this Parisian dance instructor clearly demonstrates Michael Jackson’s famous moves, breaking them down into steps and running through them slowly before performing them at full speed.

Rather than searching through his YouTube profile, it’s much better to visit his site which has links to his videos nicely arranged by level of difficulty (with a few extras at the end). Most people probably end up at his site looking for a moonwalking tutorial (which is good), but he has a lot of other content (such as his balloon pantomime)

Here’s one of my favourite videos from his site (slow motion dancing to Stranger in Moscow):

Not quite the King of Pop, but pretty close.

Update: BlackGhost pointed out that these YouTube videos were put up by tasbin (not Ramady) and that the website linked above is a tribute page only and not Ramady’s official page. Ramady’s official (French) page is Secrets of Moonwalk. Thanks BlackGhost!

A number of weeks ago, 1UP posted a feature article on the Japanese videogame development company Grasshopper Manufacture Inc. The article mostly focusses on its president, Goichi Suda. It details how he got into the games industry and later formed the company. It also describes the critical (but mixed) reception that their games have inspired.

For those that don’t know, Goichi Suda is a vanguard of the Japanese video games industry and he will be coming to Perth next year to speak at the GO3 Expo. As I have expounded on a number of previous occassions, I’m rather excited about his coming to Perth. Killer 7 really opened my eyes to what a game could be, and I am eagerly waiting for Contact to arrive from Play-Asia.

The article is a good read and perfect for getting yourself pumped up for Goichi Suda’s talk here next year!

Just a quick note.

Everyone who will be affected should know already, but onetwenty.org is moving to a new host. This blog isn’t affected, but the rest of onetwenty.org will look like this until the weekend (4-5 November):

(This is a followup to my previous post concerning the Australian Federal Government’s announcement of a discriminatory plan to fund religious positions in government and private schools.)

The Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) has a page on the National School Chaplaincy Programme (NSCP) and a fairly enlightening FAQ. Most significantly, it describes the eligibility requirements for who can be a school chaplain (and clearly prescribes that they have a religious affiliation).

The NSCP and FAQ page are riddled with weasel words and phrases. They government reminds us that chaplains play an significant role in many schools (disregarding that teachers and cousellors play an integral role in all schools). They remind us that the chaplains are to helps students regardless of the students’ religion (to detract from the fact that the chaplain is necessarily non-secular). They remind us that they are contributing funding to other programs (even though the total for these other programs amounts to less that the NSCP funding and more than half is for drug education).

I think perhaps the most incredulous thing about the NSCP FAQ page is that the government is clearly contradicting all of the values they are presenting to students under their ($29.7 million) National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools program:

• If the government were “doing their best”, they would not be introducing a discriminatory program unfairly biased towards private education.
• The government is denying professionally trained secular consellors “a fair go”.
  By ignoring the overt discrimination and using weasel words, the government is not being upfront and “honest”.
• The government shows no “respect” for professional education and personal traits, because they value then less than religious faith.
• By introducing this program, the government is communicating that it sanctions religious discrimination. This is clearly not “responsible”.
• The NSCP is clearly not “inclusive” because this funding is only available to hire people with a religious affiliation.

Details of the application process and assessment criteria will be made available in December.

The Australian Federal Government has recently committed $90 million to fund chaplains in public and private schools. This overt act of religious discrimination is absolutely astonishing. Whatever happened to seperation of church and state?

Workplace Relations Minister, Kevin Andrews said:

I think there is a broad concern in the community, amongst parents and indeed amongst a lot of young people, that having someone like a counsellor – like a chaplain – that they can go to and talk to is very important

Even if you concede that a counsellor could be “like a chaplain”, why not support and fund counsellors rather than chaplains? Why must the candidate have a religious affiliation? Isn’t it more important for them to have professional training?

The government hit back against claims of religious discrimination by noting that the program is voluntary and not limited to any particular religion. Prime Minister, John Howard asserted:

The great majority of people will support this as a very sensible initiative, and I’m quite sure that Islamic schools and Jewish schools will be as enthusiastic about this as Catholic and Protestant schools, and so they should be.

Since when are public schools Christian, Islamic, or Jewish? All goverment schools should be have no religious directives. This funding is weighted heavily towards private schools (which are predominantly religious),

John Howard continued to say:

We’re not going to discriminate, but clearly we reserve the right to say ‘no’ to somebody who’s plainly unacceptable, whatever that person’s background may be.

They are clearly discriminating based on whether the person has a religious affiliation, and the sponsoring religious organisation will be discriminating on whether the person is of the appropriate faith. This discrimination is both outlandish and overt.

Also from John Howard:

Chaplain has a particular connotation, people understand it, they know exactly what I’m talking about.

That particular connotation is that a chaplain is a Christian guidance consellor. It is blantantly ridiculous that a professional youth counsellor, who is not a member of a major religious organisation, would be inedligible for funding under this scheme. It is similarly ridiculous that an untrained, religious person would be eligible and hired in preference.

This motion communicates that the government believes that faith plays a bigger role in ethics and proficiency than any other factor. This is not only misguided, but also grossly offensive to secular people and mental health educators because it indicates that the government completely disregards years of training in preference for religious affiliation.

Update: I encourage everyone to write to John Howard and Kevin Andrews regarding this issue. I also encourage complaints to the Human Rights & Equal Opportunities Commission which deals with “breaches of human rights by or on behalf of the Commonwealth” and in particular “the impairment of equal opportunity in employment on particular grounds including: religion…”.

Update: I added my letter to John Howard to the comments section of this post.

Update: The ABC website is reporting that the Greens and the Federation of Parents and Citizens’ Associations are opposed to this plan.

Note: I should mention at the offset that this post is from an Australian perspective and may not relate to (the laws of) your region.

The internet seems to have its own ethical code that contrasts fairly dramatically with the legal system in a number of areas. By “the internet” I clearly don’t mean the millions of machines connected by cables; I mean the people who comprise the internet. Predominantly those that run websites and participate actively in forums and social networks.

Here are a number of key areas in which I think that internet culture deviates significantly from the law. I feel the internet community generally regards that:

• Looking at porn is fairly normal (or at least very common)
• Downloading shows that have been broadcast on television is alright
• Downloading roms to play on emulators is alright
• Hotlinking is theft. Copy and link to the source.

Porn

Porn is incredibly big business on the internet and most people associate the internet with porn to a large degree. If porn is in such high demand and downloading porn is so strongly associated with internet use, why can it only legally be sold (at retailers) in the ACT? All other states and territories in Australia absolutely prohibit the sale of porn (even to adults).

TV Shows

Although this is soon to change, it is illegal in Australia to record television shows or rip your audio CDs to your MP3 player. I think that the general consensus from the internet community is that it’s alright to share videos of shows that have been publically broadcast. I think that the argument is that public broadcast puts the show in the public domain. Legally, this isn’t the case.

Emulators and ROMs

The internet community tends to regard very old games or software as abandonware. This seems to include video game ROMs for old arcade machines and superceded consoles. ROMs and emulators are very popular downloads, but using an emulator to play a ROM is generally illegal (even if you have the original game). Legally, games companies still hold copyright on these games and they cannot be copied or downloaded.

Hotlinking

Hotlinking is probably the most contrasting example here. Giving credit to an author doesn’t give you a legal right to copy their image. It’s still a copyright violation unless you have explicit permission to use their image. Now, linking to a website is not copyright infringement (because you do not make or host a local copy). So arguably hotlinking is the most appropriate thing to do legally. However, it is widely frowned upon online. The general feeling seems to be that you should create a local copy (which is illegal without permission), but always provide a reference link to the site where the content was originally found.

Avoiding stereotypes

Mainstream media tends to pander to viewer insecurities and associates very negative attributes to “internet geeks”. I want to be clear that one shouldn’t extrapolate too much from the views I mentioned above. I feel that those that believe the above will (like most people) still assert that:

• Downloading complete DVD rips is pretty dodgy
• Selling burnt copies of games downloaded from the internet is wrong
• Using fake credit card details is very wrong
• Child porn is absolutely reprehensible

Reconciling our legal system

Do these internet views reflect wider social mores? If so, it seems that many of our laws are out of sync with current social values, and I believe they should be brought into line.

A few days ago I posted my writeup on the IGDA Perth Chapter social night. The official summary is now online and it includes pictures (yay!). It’s more detailed than my writeup and (obviously) not from my subjective perspective.

In related news, I’ve been accepted onto the IGDA Perth Chapter working committee as a representative for OneTwenty. I look forward to helping out in any way that I can. Here’s a picture of us (OneTwenty) at the IGDA social night:

Thanks to Martin for the photo!

I came across Awesome Video Games a couple of weeks ago via Destructoid. It’s a sort of Bill-And-Ted or Wayne’s World style show with a couple of “dudes” doing retro reviews of NES videogames.

It’s pretty funny and I love the mindless old-school theme song (obviously all done in a robot voice with 8-bit music):

Awesome video games, beep beep bop boop ba beep, video games awesome.

There are quite a lot of videogame and retro themed shows coming out under the banner of ScrewAttack.com. I have found their offerings to be a bit of a mixed bag overall, but there are some real pearlers in there. (Some episodes of GameJew are suprisingly good!) The production values are a lot higher than standard YouTube fare and it really helps set their videos apart.

Update: Episode 2 and episode 3 of Awesome Video Games are much better than episode 1 (embedded above).